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gitzebo 0.0.6

What is gitzebo?

gitzebo is a small Python git management web application. It was named
gitzebo as it is intended to be a smaller, more lightweight, more secluded
variant of the service GitHub and GitLab provide.

It is ideal for creating, managing, and sharing git repositories among
small groups of developers.

Where Does gitzebo Run?

gitzebo theoretically runs on any host with git and Python installed.

Realistically, it has only been tested on CentOS 6.5. This means that
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 will likely work with no modifications, and
that some slight variances in deployment instructions will be needed for
Debian-based hosts (including Ubuntu).

I’m working on setting up automated testing across multiple platforms.

Where’s More?

The Python Package Index (PyPI) hosts source distributions. The gitzebo
page is here. This means that
pip, easy_install, and the like can be used to install gitzebo.

Your Apache instance’s configuration directory will vary on Debian or
Ubuntu, as will the command to restart Apache.

Why Reinvent the Wheel?!

GitHub, gitorious, GitLab, and gitolite all exist already. Why not use one of
these?

The answers come down to requirements:

easy to set up

I dislike playing with configuration files for hours at a time to get
software working. Applications should work with a minimum amount of
documentation reading. Applications should work with a minimum amount of
manual steps required to get them running. Ideally, installing an
application and deploying it should take one to three commandline
invocations.

easy to use

If an application is slow, unintuitive, or fails to solve a user’s problems,
then it will go unused.

in-house deployment

I have a bone to pick with software-as-a-service (SaaS). As a rule,
I don’t like giving up
my proprietary datasets. This dislike scales up with business value of
the data: I dislike the idea of giving up a folder of dog pictures I’ve
downloaded from the internet to use as wallpapers. You’d think it’s
useless, and there’s no point to being protective: but even that data can
be used as a training dataset for artificial intelligences dealing with
visual classification… Scale it up to source code, configuration
management, and monitoring? Those three are the absolute keys to your
IT kingdom. My source code management solution will not be SaaS.

lightweight

I don’t necessarily want a bug tracker and pretty graphs and the like.
The going Linux/UNIX philosophy is to keep each component as lightweight
and focused as possible, which is something I like. I took away points
for doing too much, which it seemed all git management solutions did.

The four de-facto solutions each violated one of these requirements:

GitHub

GitHub is software-as-a-service.

gitorious

gitorious is not easy to set up.
Deployment on RHEL/CentOS 6 is a pain. You can read more here.
I gave up on this approach after a while.

GitLab

GitLab was not easy to use due to performance issues.
I got GitLab running in a VM with 1GB of memory and a dedicated core. Its
performance with two users was slow enough to regularly invoke vulgarities.
I don’t know if I missed some key setting, but we flagged it a no-go.

gitolite

gitolite also failed the ease-of-use test.
gitolite does not have a web application for management built in, so I’d
have to add one to meet my requirements. As such, it’s more of a library
or back-end than a full-blown application. It being written in Perl and
not having a well-defined API made me extremely nervous, as it seemed like
adding a web front-end would be difficult.